That can do spirit

Derek Lowe has a highly exaggerated notion of my abilities:

But some of the most important chemical reactions in the world take place down there. Take the Haber-Bosch process for producing ammonia – “Right,” I’m sure some readers of today’s newspaper are saying, “you take the Haber-Bosch process, whatever it is, and get it out of here.” But by making ammonia from nitrogen in the air, it led to (among other things) the invention of man-made fertilizers. That reaction has kept billions of people from starving to death, and kept huge swaths of wilderness from being turned into farmland. (Read up on Norman Borlaug if you haven’t already for more on this).

You can Haber-Bosch yourself some ammonia simply enough – just take iron powder, mix it with some drain cleaner (potassium hydroxide) and stir that up with some alumina and finely ground sand (silica). Heat it up to several hundred degrees and blow nitrogen and hydrogen across it; ammonia gas comes whiffing out the other end.

However, his post on the new Nobel prizewinner in Chemistry is excellent and you should read it.